If you really were influenced to great things by HJPEV, explain it well and it should go over well.

This is important. Deliberately choosing to write about fanfiction is a high-risk move, and so is high-status if you pull it off well! But you might just face-plant. (You don't try out unpracticed tricks in front of a girl you want to impress.)

Or to put it another way:

1. a high-status fictional character like Hamlet treated mediocrely is a mainstream submission
2. a low-status fictional character like Bella Swan treated mediocrely is a contrarian submission, and penalized accordingly - the intellectual equivalent of misspelling "it's/its"
3. a high-status fictional character like Ahab treated well is a conspicuous mainstream signal
4. a low-status fictional character like MoR!Harry treated well is a meta-contrarian submission, and thus is a conspicuous contrarian signal

All else equal, 3<4.